Dad and I went for a short walk around the halls near his room with the nurse’s aide. He was tired out after going one lap around the nurses’ station. After we got back to the room and the nurse hooked his heart monitor leads back up to the larger machine, he told me, “I’d like to talk more about the transgender thing, if you don’t mind.”

I texted Mom while I was standing in line at the hospital cafeteria, and told her everything was about the same. I got a text from Grandpa saying he and Grandma were shuttling his truck over to the hospital, and I texted him back telling him to meet me at the cafeteria with the keys. While I ate, I sent more texts to the Ramseys, Britt, Lisette and Poppy, and after I finished eating, I called Jada.

“I’ve been sitting with Dad at the hospital for the last few hours,” I told her. “We’ve been talking about gender stuff, and he still doesn’t get it, but I think he’s trying.”

“Oh, wow,” she said. “From what you told me about him earlier, I’d have expected hell to freeze over first.”

“Don’t get me wrong, he’s still a long way from understanding. But yeah, him even trying to understand is way better than I expected.”

“Did your mom pressure you into staying there with him? I guess she was there all night and needed rest, but your brother could have —”

“She suggested it, but I wouldn’t have said yes if Dad hadn’t been decent to me the last few days... And then, this morning before Mom and Nathan left, he told me he wanted to get to know me better.”

“I mean, I’m glad it’s turned out okay so far, but putting the two of you in a room for hours and hours could have been a disaster. Take care of yourself and don’t hesitate to walk out and tell your mom and brother one of them needs to sit with him if he starts being mean.”

“I will. I miss you.”

“Desiree will snuggle you for me.”

“We’ll snuggle when I get back to the house. But it didn’t suit for her to stay here with me.”

“Your dad didn’t want to be around your venned girlfriend?”

“I mean, he’s been decent to her this weekend. Hasn’t said much to her, but until today he and I had barely talked, either. But he said he wanted to talk to me one on one, so Desiree went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house with Nathan.”

“Well. Keep me posted, okay? And I hope your dad gets better.”

“Yeah. I’ll call you again tonight.”

* * *

Not long after I got the truck keys from Grandpa and went back to Dad’s ICU room, they drew his blood again, then moved him to a regular room on another floor. I carried all his stuff and walked along behind while a chatty Hispanic guy with cool tattoos pushed his bed down the hall to the elevator and then down a series of halls to his new room. Dad was still on a heart monitor, but his new nurse said she could switch him over to a portable machine he could carry in the pocket of his hospital gown and he could (in fact, should) walk around the halls some as soon as he felt like it.

“I feel like it now,” he said. “How long will it take to switch the monitor over?”

“Just a few minutes,” the nurse said with a laugh. “I need to ask you a few questions first. The ICU nurse didn’t include everything she was supposed to in her report...”

Twenty minutes later, Dad and I went for a short walk around the halls near his room with the nurse’s aide. He was tired out after going one lap around the nurses’ station. After we got back to the room and the nurse hooked his heart monitor leads back up to the larger machine, he told me, “I’d like to talk more about the transgender thing, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” I said. “What questions did you have?”

“Your mother reminded me a few months ago about the time you put on one of Courtney’s dresses when you were about four or five. And even after thinking about it a lot, neither of us can remember anything else that would indicate you might be transgender until you ran away and sent us that letter. What was going on in between those?”

“I don’t remember enough from my early childhood to be sure,” I said. “I mostly remember looking in the mirror while I was wearing Courtney’s dress, plus a few random other incidents that don’t seem relevant to anything. I’m guessing I suppressed that desire to be a girl because of how y’all punished me and chewed me out after you caught me wearing the dress, and I kept suppressing it for a long time. I’d have an occasional thought about how it would be nice to be a girl, but I wouldn’t say anything about it or think about it more than I could help because I thought it was weird and people would laugh at me, or worse. Until the Venn machines came along, and Meredith transitioned, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore because it was a real possibility. Not long after that, I realized I wanted to be a girl more than anything. And talking to Meredith, and some other trans people she put me in contact with, I realized that meant I already was a girl on the inside.”

“So you started meeting up with Meredith and venning into a girl for an hour or two whenever you could?”

“Yeah.” I hesitated a moment, and decided it was time to tell him more about my non-human venns. “Not just human girl forms. Sometimes dragon-girls, or little four-legged dragons, small enough to fly. I was trying to figure out what my ideal body would be, and if that wasn’t human, what would be the best human body I could wear to work if I couldn’t find a job that let people come to work visibly venned.”

“But you eventually got that job at the Venn restaurant, instead.”

Mom must have told him about that — or maybe he’d heard me talking about it with Grandma and Grandpa this past weekend. “Yeah. It’s pretty good for a service job; our new boss is a little more strict than the guy who founded the place, but he’s still been really good about letting me take a few more days’ off to stay with you while you’re sick.”

“So... You don’t look like this normally? You’re usually a... humanoid dragon?”

“I have a favorite dragon-girl body that I usually wear when I’m not working, yeah. Then I have a bunch of bodies I’ve worn for work, a lot of them just once. Mostly dragon-girls of one sort or another, but some other things, too.”

“Do you have any pictures of that... dragon-girl body you usually have?”

“I think so; let me check.” I had never gotten in the habit of taking a lot of selfies, but I had taken more pictures of myself and my friends since I’d started dating Jada and Britt than I used to. I skimmed through the pictures on my phone gallery; the last few were from the athletics protest (I was human that day), and before that, several from Thanksgiving dinner at the Ramseys’. There was one selfie of my dragon-girl body, but it had turned out kind of blurry and poorly lit, so I kept looking. Before that there were some pictures from when Britt and I went to the racetrack to see Poppy and Lisette race; there were pictures of my friends and some of the races, but not me. While I was searching, Dad said:

“So... going back to what you said about already being a girl inside before you started venning. What made you decide that you were a girl and didn’t just want to be one?”

While he was talking, I kept scrolling back and looking at pictures. Before the race, the next half dozen pictures were from Halloween, but the only one I was in showed me in my two-headed dragon body with Britt and Jada as shoulder angel and devil.

“It’s pretty simple,” I said. “Guys don’t want to be girls. But girls who are born in the wrong kind of body do want to have the body that fits them. A few cisgender guys have some occasional curiosity about what it would be like, and now that the Venn machines are everywhere, they might even indulge that curiosity, but they don’t obsess over it or want to stay female permanently like I did. Basically, I talked to Meredith a lot, and to some other trans girls, and read some autobiographical essays by other trans women, and a lot of the details were different, but there were enough experiences I recognized that I was pretty sure I was a girl before long.”

I had to go all the way back to July or August before I found a picture of my everyday dragon-girl body, next to Jada with our arms around each other. “Oh,” I added, “and here’s a picture of me with the dragon-girl body I was talking about.” I handed him my phone.

“Who’s the girl with you?” he asked.

“Jada — you met her plushie self, Desiree. When she splits into a human and a plushie, the plushie goes by her middle name.”

After some explanation of splitting one’s consciousness across bodies, he brought the topic back to gender, and I explained some more Gender 101. But he was getting tired and fell asleep while I was talking. I texted Mom and Nathan and then read until someone came to draw blood again and Dad woke up. His supper tray came not long after that, and I decided not to go to the cafeteria as I’d be back at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in an hour or so and could eat Grandma’s cooking.

Nathan showed up to relieve me a little later, bringing a small bag with a change of clothes and his toiletries. Since Dad wasn’t in ICU anymore, we could both be in the room with Dad, at least for a few minutes before I went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I filled in Nathan on how Dad had been doing and what the nurse had told us about the prep for the next morning’s procedure.

“I’m glad we had a chance to talk,” Dad said to me. “I’ll see you tomorrow after the procedure.”

“Take care of yourself, Dad,” I said. “I love you.”

“I love you too... Lauren.” Despite the hesitation, I was ecstatic. It was the first time he’d used my name since Christmas Eve when he thanked me for his Christmas present.

* * *

The next morning, Mom and I woke up to texts from Nathan saying they’d taken Dad for the procedure a few minutes before seven. Nathan called us while we were eating breakfast, saying Dad was in the recovery area and might be back in his room by the time we got there.

“The doctor said they couldn’t find the source of the bleeding in his esophagus, stomach, or the first little bit of his small intestines,” he said after Mom put him on speakerphone. “There were the ulcers you told us about, but they’d mostly healed and hadn’t bled much recently, certainly not enough to make him pass out and need a transfusion. So they’ll check his large intestines tomorrow.”

“I’m not surprised,” Mom said. “We’ll be there as soon as we finish breakfast.”

So we went over to the hospital and found Dad, still slightly groggy from the sedation, getting settled in his room again. Nathan and I stayed an hour, and then went back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, leaving Mom to spend the day with him.

Nathan took a nap when we got back to the house, as he hadn’t slept well, and I went for a walk with him when he woke up a couple of hours later. We played a couple of games with Grandma and Grandpa and watched a movie, talking with Mom on the phone every few hours.

“He’s been going to the bathroom every few minutes and sometimes needing help,” Mom said. “It’s probably more appropriate for me to stay with him at this stage. You can stay with him tomorrow after his colonoscopy.”

Desiree and I spent a long time on video chat with Jada and Britt that evening. I was supposed to have been home by this point; now I wasn’t even sure I’d be home before Jada had to return to college.

During the night, Nathan woke me up.

“Mom just called. Dad’s been bleeding again and they’re going to give him another transfusion. He’s still in a regular room for now, but they might move him back to the ICU if it gets worse.”

“Oh, no. Should we go over there?”

“Not right now, she said, but be ready to go if she calls back and says to.”

She called or texted every hour or two after that. Dad stabilized again after the transfusion, but when we blearily arrived at the hospital the next morning (Grandpa drove us, since neither of us had gotten enough sleep), he was looking paler and weaker than he’d been when I saw him the previous morning. The colonoscopy was scheduled for mid-morning, and they took him downstairs for it while we were hanging out in his room and talking. Nathan and I stayed with Mom while we waited for the results.

“He’s in recovery now,” the doctor told us an hour or so later. “But we didn’t find the source of the bleeding. Given how recently we know it was bleeding, that pretty much rules out the colon, meaning the source of the bleeding is most likely in the part of the small intestines we couldn’t reach with an endoscope, where it will be difficult to reach it. There are still things we could do, but honestly, given Mr. Wallace’s conditional objections to venning, I would suggest considering whether they still apply.”

“We’ll talk with him about it when he wakes up,” Mom said. “What are the other options, if he still won’t consider it?”

My new short fiction collection, Gender Panic and Other Stories, contains 253,948 words of transgender fiction: seven short stories, seven novelettes, one novella, and two short novels. Six of the stories (including both novels), 163,318 words, have never appeared online before. It can be found at:

• Smashwords (epub)
• itch.io (epub, pdf, and mobi)
• Amazon (Kindle)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here: